Peeps and beer: What brews pair best with Easter candy?

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Beer and Peeps pairing, anyone? Chocolate bunnies taste great with a
raspberry lambic or chocolatey porter, while Peeps pair well with a bourbon
barrel-aged beer and Creme Eggs with a helles. (Getty Images)

There’s no surer sign of spring than supermarket aisles brimming with jelly beans, Peeps and chocolate rabbits. Come Easter Sunday, my kids will stuff themselves silly — and then the rest of the spring candy will sit around all month taunting me. So why not invite a few friends over for an adult candy tasting?

Chocolate bunnies: One of the most ubiquitous of the Easter confections, chocolate bunnies are also the easiest to pair with beer. A raspberry lambic or other raspberry fruit beer is perfect. Lindemans Framboise is a sweet one, which pairs well with all sorts of chocolates, especially if you want to stay on the sweeter side. More traditional sour lambics, like Cantillon Rosé de Gambrinus, are especially good with bittersweet or dark chocolate because they balance the competing sweet and sour. And raspberry and chocolate are a match made in heaven.

Chocolate goes well with non-lambics, too. Dark beers — American stouts, imperial stouts and robust porters — work particularly well because of their roasted malt and chocolate notes.

Peeps: The vanilla notes of these sweet marshmallow treats pair beautifully with a bourbon barrel-aged beer, such as Anderson Valley Wild Turkey Bourbon Barrel Stout. The vanillin in the beer brings out the same flavors in the Peeps, amplifying them but damping down the sweetness. Anderson Valley’s Salted Caramel Bourbon Barrel Aged Porter adds even more layers.

Creme Eggs: This Easter staple dates back to 1923. The white and yellow fondant are meant to imitate an actual egg in sweet cream and chocolate form. A good beer pairing would be something lighter bodied, such as a weissbier, witbier, American wheat beer or helles. A cream stout or milk stout would also work nicely, because of the milklike notes they often have.

Cadbury also makes a caramel egg that I think works even better with beer, especially malt-forward beers, such as porters, stouts, brown ales and even amber ales. On the lager side, bocks, black lagers and märzens are good options, too.

Peanut Butter Eggs: These were my childhood favorite, and I still indulge in them every spring. The chocolate shell is nice, but the peanut-butter filling is the star of these candies. A good American stout with chocolate notes will complement the chocolate layer and balance the peanut butter filling.

Jelly beans: These may be the toughest to pair simply because there are hundreds of jellybean flavors. Jelly Belly, for example, lists 50 official flavors plus another 150 specialty ones. A few years ago, Jelly Belly even created a draft-beer flavored bean that’s still available online. Combine the beer jellybean with other flavors to create specific beers, such as beer+watermelon for a candied 21st Amendment Hell or High Watermelon Wheat.

Jelly bean pairings are ideal for experimentation. Who knows what delights you’ll hit upon or what disastrous combinations you’ll uncover? Either way, you’re only down a few jellybeans and a swallow of beer, but you’ve had the best Easter beer tasting ever.

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